The reason I and many others suspect foul play in this contest is that Phyllis received about 600,000 votes within an hour this morning. Every time you refreshed the page, she'd have 20,000 more votes every minute -- while Zach's votes were actually going down. Accumulating votes at that rate is impossible without rigging or cheating the system.
If Zach got first place in the votes, and then Oprah chose Phyllis, she'd be accused of "hating the disabled." But if Zach is in second place, Oprah can just say, "I chose the person with the most votes!" It's a devious ploy.
Also, Phyllis's "VOTE" button is coded differently from everyone else's. There's plenty of grounds for suspicion.

We're pretty sure that the contest is rigged so that 1 vote for zack equals 10 points for the Dr. Phyllis, who is coincidentally a black woman (just like Oprah) and Zach has cerebral palsy (sexiest of the palsies).

Zach's vote count has been fluctuating up and DOWN.
Try to get "Oprah rigs votes against Zach Anner" to the top of google trends.

Also, email Fox News about this so the story will hopefully get some coverage. If you're going to send something, sound intelligent. Inform them about the obvious voting fraud. Be sure to mention that Zach has cerebral palsy and that Dr. Phyllis just happens to be a black woman. Mention that Zach has a huge internet following, while Phyllis is completely unknown. GO

EDIT: spread the word! post on twitter, facebook, google search, blog comments, etc. To all the white knights out there, stop screaming racism. I am just pointing out coincidences. Remember, no Atlantis is too underwater or fictional!

"WomenAreUs: I am also a fellow female teacher and can attest to these hardships. I love the idea behind your show and have set up a vote bot to vote for you a thousand times every hour! I hope you win Dr. Phyllis!" -comments page of Dr. Phyllis

the top five (5) videos will join the finalist pool. These finalists will fly to Los Angeles for the next round of the audition process. In Los Angeles, the producers will select ten (10) cast members for the television competition series. One (1) slot on the television competition series is guaranteed to go to one of the top five (5) online favorites.

has nobody commented on the fact this 'so called' doctors name is Phyliis? Hmm... Dr. Phil - and now, Dr. Phyllis... IT'S ALL A SHAM I TELL YA! There is too many doctors on TV and not enough people with cerebral palsy. Let the kid shine you big beautiful billionaire.

How do we know that this post wasn't submitted by Oprah herself, in an attempt to legally cover her ass for disqualifying Zach? This is pretty obvious evidence of cheating the system, in Zach's favor...which could disqualify him. Do you remember how quickly Zach jumped from 30k votes, to 1.5M? I believe it was overnight...

Don't get too particular about him staying in 1st place. All that needs to happen is that he finishes within the top 5. And there is nothing to worry about in that department. The Internet has already chosen Zach, and will see to it that he is present in the group of finalists.

You're an idiot for stating that Oprah would rig the system for a "fat black woman", on the grounds that she is a fat black woman. Oprah scares the shit out of me for the control she holds with the middle class housewife demographic...but that is no reason to accuse her of being as big of an idiot as you are. Stick with provable facts, or at the very least substantially backed accusations.

And seriously...at this point, Zach doesn't even need Oprah. He's already achieved a level of popularity that makes companies see dollar signs. Support Zach, vote for him, spread his videos, turn your friends on to his humor and wit...but don't contrast his good spirit with stupid actions and comments such as contained in this post.

I think this is more about plausible deniability. If he's just in the top 5 and someone else is chosen, no one will care. If he's number one and they choose a different contestant, there will be a shitstorm, even if that's perfectly fine according to the rules.

Meh. I think that 4chan rigged the teacher to win so they could claim Oprah rigged it so a black woman would beat a disabled white guy, and get internet outrage to spread the "news" to discredit Oprah. I'm surprised people are naive enough to think that Oprah would rig a contest where she can already pick at random from the top 5 as she sees fit. This isn't nearly as funny as the Over 9000 gag they pulled on her a while back.

The reason I and many others suspect foul play in this contest is that Phyllis received about 600,000 votes within an hour this morning. Every time you refreshed the page, she'd have 20,000 more votes every minute -- while Zach's votes were actually going down. Accumulating votes at that rate is impossible without rigging or cheating the system.

If Zach got first place in the votes, and then Oprah chose Phyllis, she'd be accused of "hating the disabled." But if Zach is in second place, Oprah can just say, "I chose the person with the most votes!" It's a devious ploy.

Haha that's completely horrible. Anyone figured out what it does differently yet?

I feel like someone who has collected all the pertinent info and screenshots and everything should put together an image that clearly details, with visual proof, exactly what's going on. Nobody cares about reading through half a dozen Reddit comment threads, but a single image showing what's going on with the votes and the suspicious vote button would spread like wildfire.

It's not uncommon for people to gamble on these kinds of things. I recall some years ago in the UK there was some problems with telephone voting systems for a popular TV talent show being rigged by auto-callers, to swing the vote in the favour of someone with higher odds. I expect it might seem easier to rig an online vote than a phone vote.

or maybe Oprah and her producers are too afraid to admit that their new host was selected by the "child molesters" (read 4chan) that they were bashing a few months ago (and of course Reddit). What they don't realize is that if they went ahead with making Zach's show, it might become the greatest shift in viewer demographic that any network has ever experienced... and if its not, fuck it, cancel the show after 1 season.

Ultimately, the following is sent to the server:
GET /audition/index.html?request=vote_confirm
Cookie: YOS_AUD_VT=1,5615,NA

This request is what adds one vote.

That "NA" value would be the eid. Once the server gets it, who knows what that value does. To fan the conspiracy flames "eid" could mean employee ID, which means it could be an administrative back door of sorts, allowing for multivote. It could just as easily be nothing at all. I am a bit suspicious though that one contestant had a specific value here that no one else had.

Not quite. What happens is when you click the vote button it sets the cookie and pushes you to the page you described above. That does not add the vote though, what that does is execute JavaScript once that voting confirmation page has loaded and that takes the contents of the YOS_AUD_VT cookie (set on the previous page through JS) and constructs a GET request to /audition/index.html?request=add_vote, and it is that request that finally adds the vote.

Look at the page source for audition/index.html?request=vote_confirm and you will see:

Because they are using log analysis to count the votes (which means it probably isn't in real time), they could be using the first request to increment a dumb counter and then run a process regularly to count the votes from the log and balance the score. If many people were gaming the system as you described, it could account for the gap in the results.

To fan the conspiracy flames "eid" could mean employee ID, which means it could be an administrative back door of sorts, allowing for multivote.

They refer to it as the eid in add_vote() but it is called the src entity id elsewhere (like the vote confirmation page).

And entity ID looks to be just some number to identify the person. Looks to be optional... so not sure why it showed up before on her page and not his. But you can see entity id is used for profiles. Her profile

Not sure why LillianSkincare's ID would show up on Dr. Phyllis' vote page.

edit2: Thinking about it... it's "src entity id", it seems that would mean, if logged in, that's where the source of the vote is coming from. So basically, a way to keep track of who is voting for whom. So someone signed in as LillianSkincare was logged in while looking at the source code.

why does this seem like it hits so many of the bases from all the random stuff floating around in the last week.

the "images make front page more than non-images" the whole "crazy dude hunts osama" then "crazy dude is a hero" "wait the timestamps one posts are wrong" oh wait "didn't some website want to troll reddit" no that other site would never load a vote and get another website to validate how one candidate is clearly cheating or the vote is rigged.

Haha, yeah, Oprah is personally rigging votes on a low level competition run by a company near the handle of her conglomerates umbrella in order to thrust to power a black person, because Oprah's first and last thought everyday is the advancement of colored people. And also, this grassroots campaign to get Zach hired is in itself vote rigging, I guarantee more than half of the people that voted for him so far did not listen to what the other contestants had to say. 4chan using reddit to feed fox news fake stories. I never thought I would see the day.

As far as I could tell, you are free to vote for whomever you want. If I listened to someone else and liked what they had to say, I'd throw a vote their way too. It's not about liking one over another, it's about liking one. Sure, he was thrown a lot of views from the social sites like reddit and 4chan, maybe even digg, but as our upvote/downvote system shows, if the people didn't like him, they likely wouldn't have voted for him. It's a crying shame that Zach's popularity is probably getting him labeled as a cheater and thus getting his votes redacted, and it's shameful that Harpo is fiddling with the numbers. Something doesn't smell right about this, and attention should be drawn to it. Who knows, maybe some other benefactor (The Donald, your country needs you now more than ever!) might take it upon him/herself to offer Zach a show without having to be beholden to the kind of people who possibly rig votes.

I for one meant it when I voted for Zach. He has a positivity and a charm that is lacking in the world today. I wish him all the best!

I agree with you. I watched the guys video and would have voted for him based of his charisma and the quality of his character. But speaking for myself I have never watched nor do I care about any of Oprah's programming, I first heard about the contest from this site, as I imagine the majority of the people that voted for him did. But I do know that Oprah has a few fans herself, my mother included. I am guessing the viewership/readership of Oprah's television shows, magazines, and websites, which I imagine to be in the tens of millions, could organize and eclipse the sun in a righteous fury if they so desired. And maybe that is just what happened here. Personally I think that it is cool to stand behind Zack if he is wronged in this but unnecessary to fight his battle for him. I think the whole point of his proposed show is that he wants to show the world that a disabled person can get along just fine and not get treated special or like a victim because of his situation, and internet conspiracy theory's and website hacking in his name would just defeat his intentions. Besides, no matter what happens I am pretty sure he is gonna land on his feet:)

Well said. Yeah, Oprah does have a pretty big viewership; I wonder how many of them are net savvy. It's a curiosity, to be sure. I think what's happening is that Zach is just so darn charming that many feel a need to stand up for him, especially when it seems that something fishy is going on. Something definitely doesn't seems off about the voting, and even for the sake of others in the contest, it needs to be checked into. Pure and simple, if what everyone suspects is happening, it's fraud being perpetrated across state lines via the internet. Doesn't that make it a federal crime? I'm not saying we should "fight Zach's fight" but I am saying this should be looked into.

Indeed, it should not have anything to do with it. Coincidentally though, the black woman was the one who magically shot up over a million votes in 12 hours on a contest run by one of the most famous black woman out there which deals with helping a new face get on TV. Totally a coincidence though obviously. Oprah and those who promote her have nothing to gain from the new face being a near clone of Oprah, right?

Or maybe there is something to it? Who knows for sure, but to pretend that her being black is a totally irrelevant and should never be brought up on any level is fucking PC idiocy.

"Today on Oprah!: This intelligent, black, middle-aged, female teaches in a rough area. She'll be sharing with us stories and experiences of how hard it is."

Not that I'm well-versed in Oprah's trends, but as someone moderately aware of her it truly looks like something not only Oprah, but probably share holders would want. The woman much more directly represents Oprah's demographic than the witty, young white male with cerebral palsy. I don't know how most Redditors feel about Oprah, but I have a feeling most of us don't enjoy her program and maybe even don't like her as a person (look how fast most were to judge).

Personally, I'm just waiting for this to get big and shit to hit the fan. I'm having fun watching this unfold.

Just refreshing the Total Votes page a couple times shows the ridiculous amount of votes going towards Phyllis. I don't want to involve racism in it, but to be honest, it's very clear that there is something working towards boosting Phyllis' votes.

I wouldn't go so far as to suggest it is Oprah herself, I imagine it is just some troll team from 4chan that wants to rain on everyone's parade.

Actually, if you go to 4chan, you'll find that they're definitely not behind it. They're trying to reverse the tide and vote for Zach as much as possible.

I suspect that the people organizing the contest found it politically expedient to 'nudge' the disabled guy to second place so that they don't have to deal with the consequences of him being the popular choice.

Because overnight in the US, between 4:30AM and about noon, you mean to tell me that 1.5 million (half a percent of American population, 1 out of every 200) decided to all log on and vote for Phyllis all at once, while the current leader, favorite of nocturnal 4channers, Zach, recieved about 100,000 to 200,000 votes, about 10% of Phyllis?

To all those asking for proof. This would be impossible to prove without us breaking into the server that the site is hosted on. And although we like justice, nobody wants to go to jail. There is evidence that all seems to point to cheating here though. Some people have decided the evidence labels her guilty. Some people decided that she remains innocent until we have hard proof shes doing it. At least it's out there now though for those who can get proof one way or the other to investigate it. Who is this Dr Phyllis? Who is voting for her? These are the questions we want answered and were just trying to get our evidence to those who can answer it and get noticed...

the top five (5) videos will join the finalist pool. These finalists will fly to Los Angeles for the next round of the audition process. In Los Angeles, the producers will select ten (10) cast members for the television competition series. One (1) slot on the television competition series is guaranteed to go to one of the top five (5) online favorites.

Basically, there is no difference between getting first or fifth (or any in between) you will go to LA for the next step.

If Zach got first place in the votes, and then Oprah chose Phyllis, she'd be accused of "hating the disabled."

No she wouldn't. Go read the freaking terms on this contest before posting idiotic stuff.

Second:

What is up with everyone throwing around "voting fraud" and rigging and crap. It's an online poll for a new tv show. "voting fraud" is like when the new voting machines can't count or do other basic functions, or if a poll worker rigs an actual poll, for real things like elected officials.

And then after all this hot air about "voting fraud" and rigging, you provide some script to boost a google trend rating. Ok...

Third:

Also, email Fox News about this so the story will hopefully get some coverage.

WTF? You are talking to reddit and encouraging us to email foxnews?? /facepalm

Fourth:

We're pretty sure that the contest is rigged so that 1 vote for zack equals 10 points for the Dr. Phyllis

Care to site this? Someone on 4chan found that every vote for zach was 2 for phyllis, but thats hardly a credible source in any case.

Last:

Dr. Phyllis, who is coincidentally a black woman (just like Oprah) and Zach has cerebral palsy (sexiest of the palsies).

Someone pointed out how Phyllis accumulated something like 20k votes but the views on her page didn't increase at all. I thought that was probably one of the most suspicious thing I saw about this whole thing.

who cares if an african american woman or a disabled man hosts this show? all they're gonna do is give away free stuff!
and if any of these 2 dont make it... thy'll probably end up on another network hosting another show... just like the american idol contestants who dont end up winning.... its just boring so called reality tv... predictable watch Futurama instead!

look, they're looking for the next dr. phil type of con artist for her base, not to change television with a really funny dude who would make a good television show they wouldn't know how to sell maxi pads during.

i dont want to sound like the only voice of reason here, but you all realize that the winner was always going to be chosen by the producers, right? while zach would definitely be an entertaining and, at times, heartwarming show, it does not make for good/profitable television. a black housewife with problems (just like yours!) telling people what to do, uplifting them, whatever gets women off these days, etc. is marketable and the mindless watchers of television will support it.